


Customs of the Land and the Sea

by magpie_fngrl



Series: Tumblr AU Prompts [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Getting Together, M/M, Mermaid Harry Potter, POV Draco Malfoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-16 18:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13641633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magpie_fngrl/pseuds/magpie_fngrl
Summary: Draco Malfoy comes to on a beach after a shipwreck to find out that the legends are true: merfolk exist and he's staring at one of them.





	Customs of the Land and the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a tumblr fill to this ask: **go-to-helvetica** said: “a mermaid au because mermaid!Harry is my jam”
> 
> Many thanks to **Palendrome(nerdherderette)** for the fast beta! ❤❤❤  
>  All remaining mistakes are mine as I've done some revision since first posting on tumblr.

Sunlight tickled Draco’s eyelids, tugging him out of a deep slumber. Licking his dry lips, he tasted sand and jerked awake. With wakefulness came the feeling of heavy, soaked limbs and burning lungs. He turned to his side and retched saltwater. Coughing, he wiped his face and attempted to sit up when a hand touched him lightly on the back.

‘Are you OK?’

Draco flinched with an undignified squeak.

Startling green eyes met his. The green eyes belonged to a face more handsome than faces had any right to be. Draco felt another part of him burning, somewhere lower than the lungs this time. The man’s naked torso was glistening and tan, and Draco swallowed hard as his eyes travelled down the planes of his chest and stomach — and came upon a silvery tail, twitching in the surf.

A merman! The legends were true, then.

Draco shook his damp hair out of his eyes and sat up. A quick glance told him he was in a small cove, not far from his town. He dimly remembered a storm breaking out during the night, the waves slamming into — oh fuck. They’d been out on Theo’s yacht.

‘Where are the others? Are they OK?’ He rasped, his throat hurting.

The merman shrugged. ‘Maybe? I don’t know what happened to them. Perhaps my friends saved them. Or ate them.’

Draco shuddered and shuffled a little back onto the beach. The stories had always insisted that the merfolk spelled certain death for whomever came across one. ‘Is that why you brought me here?’

The merman tilted his head. ‘No, I don’t eat on the land.’

Draco’s shoulders refused to relax. ‘Why did you save me then? It was you who brought me here, right?’

The merman’s gaze travelled all over Draco’s face, then his body, making Draco’s cheeks heat up, his skin tingle. It was a predatory gaze, curious and greedy, but also tinged with a sentiment that Draco couldn’t discern.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ the merman offered as a explanation.

‘You have?’ Draco spent a lot of his time in the sea, usually taking one of his family’s boats for sailing or fishing in the bay. ‘What’s your name?’

‘In my country I’m called—’ here the merman made a screeching sound that pierced Draco’s ears. It sounded like Haerrrr and a long vowel eee at the end.

Draco gave it a try. ‘Harry?’

The merman mouthed the word as if tasting it. ‘Harry is good,’ he decided. ‘And you’re Draco. I heard your friends call you that.’ He blushed and his tail stirred in the surf.

Draco let his gaze wander down Harry’s torso and he burrowed his fingers in the sand to stop himself from reaching out to touch him. He’d heard of the merfolk beauty, but he also knew it was more than that. ‘Charming like the devil, they are. They lure you in,’ his grandfather used to tell him on winter nights when the sea outside his window raged and swallowed ships whole. ‘And then they have their way with you, down in the murky depths of their world.’

In those days, ‘having their way with you’ had conjured images of torture. Now, Draco could think of another interpretation that made his mouth dry.

Harry didn’t make him feel unsafe. He made him feel quite a lot of things, but fear wasn’t one of them. Draco stretched his hand out. The merman looked at it but made no move to take it.

‘In my country it’s custom,’ Draco explained, ‘to shake the hand of the man who saved your life.’

Full lips stretched into a smile that almost made Draco’s heart stop. Death by supernatural beauty: that’d be a first. Harry took his hand and Draco squeezed it lightly. Harry squeezed back. His hand was large and warm, and felt wonderful wrapped around Draco’s.

Draco didn’t want to let go. ‘Thank you for saving me.’ For a brief moment, an impulse to follow Harry to the sea overwhelmed him, and, startled, he dropped his hand.

The tide was coming in, the water reaching Harry’s waist and soaking Draco's boots. He pulled his feet up, even though every part of him was damp.

Harry gazed out to the sea. ‘I need to go back in.’ His tail flopped impatiently. ‘I wish — I wish I could stay longer.’

‘I wish you could, too,’ Draco whispered.

Harry turned his back, his tail splashing once in the water, but he seemed to change his mind. He turned back to Draco, bit his lower lip and reached out. He buried his fingers in Draco’s hair, caressing white-blond strands, running down Draco’s skull in a way that brought shivers to Draco’s spine. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ Harry smiled wistfully. ‘It’s… it feels nice.’

Draco’s heart pounded as loud as the sea. ‘It does.’ His voice came strangled and he coughed to clear it. ‘It feels really nice.’

Harry’s fingers trailed down Draco’s face. ‘You feel different, too,’ Harry whispered. ‘It’s so hard — to leave you. Now that I know what you— what you feel like to hold.’ Face swiftly turning red, Harry shifted down the shore. A second later, his tail flapped in the surf, and then he was gone.

Draco returned to the town to find it in unrest and mourning. Fishermen had gone missing since the storm and Theo and Vince had yet to be seen, but Blaise had found his way to the shore riding — according to the stories he told everyone who’d listen down the pub — a giant turtle. Blaise had always had a tendency to tell tall tales, but how could Draco doubt him ever again? The legends were true; perhaps turtles let people ride them to safety just as mermaids touched people’s hair. He didn’t tell anyone about _his_ experience. Let Blaise have the attention and give interviews to the county’s paper. Draco wasn’t in the mood.

In fact, his mood changed drastically since that morning. His parents attributed it to surviving a shipwreck, a normal response to trauma, and Draco allowed them to believe that. He felt listless after meeting Harry. He ate little, slept little and thought of the merman constantly. He had no idea how he could go through life without ever seeing him again. He went fishing several times in the next two weeks, but Harry was nowhere to be seen. Of course, Draco had never noticed him before. Perhaps Harry saw him and stayed away.

That made Draco feel worse.

When at home, he spent all his time in his workshop carving wooden figurines; but whereas in the past he carved dragons and serpents, he now carved sea creatures, fantastical and fanciful — creatures that drew the admiration of friends, even though his father disdained them as he held no respect for anything that wasn’t useful.

Draco’s favourite wooden animal was a half-dragon, half-dolphin that was small enough to hang around his neck with black string.

A fortnight after the storm, on the night of the new moon, his mother caught him at the front door. ‘Going fishing again?’

‘Just here in the bay,’ he told her. ‘I’ll take the _Narcissa_.’ It was the small green boat Draco’s father had gifted to his mother when they were engaged.

She laid her hand on him. ‘You’re different. It looks like grief, but it’s as if someone has cast a spell on you. You seem distracted all the time. Oh! Draco…’ her eyes lit up and she took a step back to take him in. ‘Are you in _love_?’

Draco had no idea what he was except that he felt as if he was drowning in a longing he could never satisfy. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and opened the front door. ‘I’ll see you later.’

The evening was calm and his boat bobbed quietly in the dark water. Draco sat back on the stern and let his right hand trail in the ocean, while he looked at the stars. They held as many secrets as the ocean. The breeze whispered softly and he’d almost dozed off, his hand still trailing the cold water, when something brushed against his fingers. Draco’s eyes shot open, body tense and mind alert.

His hand felt the stirring in the water again and the feel of something warm, something that wrapped around it. Draco’s heart drummed fast and loud as he turned to the starboard side and saw a dark shape in the water. Two hands grabbed the side of the small fishing boat and Harry pushed himself up, water dripping down his face and naked chest. In the starlight, he looked as fanciful as the creatures Draco carved; a figment of his imagination, a dream made real because he willed it so.

Draco wrapped his fingers around the dragon-fish he wore around his neck and knelt on the side. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’

‘I thought I could stay away,’ Harry murmured. ‘I couldn’t.’

‘So you saw me all those times I came out here?’

Harry gazed in Draco’s eyes. ‘I looked for you every night.’ He caressed Draco’s hair again, his touch causing Draco's lungs to strain for air. ‘Your hair reminds me of the stars.’ 

‘”Fairy hair” they call it in my town,’ Draco murmured and leaned closer, feeling Harry’s breath on him. ‘I’ve missed you. I-I brought you something.’

He pulled back a little and took off the wooden animal. ‘I made this,’ Draco said. ‘I’d like you to have it. Something from the land.’

Startled, Harry nodded, and Draco put it around his head. His fingers traced the cool, wet skin and rested around Harry’s neck.

‘In my country it’s custom,’ Harry said in a low voice, ‘to kiss the person who gives you a gift.’

The force of Draco’s desire flooded him, and he felt powerless to resist the deluge. He leaned his nose against Harry's. ‘It’s a good custom,’ he whispered, his lips playing on Harry’s salty mouth, his heart thrumming a wild tattoo against his ribs.

‘Customs should be observed,’ Harry murmured, his silvery tail flapping below him, and kissed Draco. He tasted of the sea and of something feral and untameable and utterly enchanting. Draco deepened the kiss, one hand cupping Harry’s face, the other holding him tight around the shoulders. The sensation of Harry's ocean mouth on his, demanding and insistent and increasingly more ferocious, made Draco's blood sing. He could spend eons kissing Harry and he knew with a certainty as final as death what it meant to give your heart to the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello at [tumblr](http://magpiefngrl.tumblr.com/)!


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